Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Dust in the Air, Dust in the Gears…

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Peeked out the window at 5 this morning. The air was (and still is) so dirty it looks foggy out there. Ugh. Nice Valley fever weather.

Oh well. At this time of morning it’s cool enough to walk the dog, so we took a stroll through the rich folks’ neighborhood. And the pool water is perfect for a post-doggywalk dip.

The pool is sooooo much easier to take care of now that the devil-pod tree is gone! It’s practically trouble-free. Yesterday I had a new guy from a new company come over to clean out the filter, which he did quickly and for less than Leslie’s charges. The last CSR encounter with Leslie’s pretty much tore it for me. Went over to Angie’s List and started calling A-rated companies till I found one that considers a central Phoenix house to be in its “area.” Liked the guy: he was quiet and efficient. And now the pool is humming along merrily.

Meanwhile, my computer seems have gotten a little fog-making dust in its innards. Yesterday Word crashed (again). I think the Word for Mac on the desktop has corrupted. It’s emitting those “Word had to quit unexpectedly. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this has caused” messages. What this means is that you’ve lost everything since your last autosave, and possibly then some.

The other day when that happened, I rebooted and it started opening scores and scores of old files!

At first I thought, holy sh!t, no wonder it crashed if I had that many files sitting open! Because I do get in the habit, sometimes, of leaving way too many files open in various programs. But soon (as in instantly) it became apparent that no one could have that many files open at once.

Force-quit.

Start over.

Does it again!

Force-quit.

Start over.

Does it again!!!

So I just sat there and let it open and open and open…thought it was going to open all the files on the disk, which would be about 2700. But no, it finally stopped after 30 or 40.

So now I had to close each one manually. And no, they were definitely not things I’d been working on. Some dated back to 2008! Hadn’t been opened in years!

As nothing, though, compared to yesterday’s adventures. I’d been working on a client’s book; spent about three hours on the current chunk of copy the previous day and expected to finish  in about an hour and a half. It’s difficult, arcane, and tiring to read. Goin’ along fine for about a half-hour, and

“Word had to quit unexpectedly”

Damn.

Reboot. Open the file.

Take a look… It has lost ALL of the work I’d done the day before!!!!!!!!!

WTF? How is that possible? I know I hit save before I went to bed, and besides, the thing is set to save every ten minutes. It should have saved almost all the edits I’d entered. Thrash around and thrash around: nope! No backups, no nothin’!

Weirdly, it had saved stuff I’d done near the end, in the past half-hour or so. But  none of the stuff I’d done the previous day!

So I was mightily screwed. I had to redo three hours of work before I could get on to the hour and a half worth that remained. Set the thing to autosave every three minutes. Typing and typing and wrestling and wrestling, and damned if it doesn’t crash AGAIN! This time it saved all but about two pages of edits. E-mailed it to myself and downloaded onto the laptop. Used the Macbook to finish editing the chapter. Took hours and hours and hours. All that work I’d done the day before was down the toilet, reducing my pay from $45/hour (academic rate) to about $22.50/hour.

More annoyingly, I’d planned to give myself a little break yesterday afternoon. In the Darwin Award department, I’ve hurt my back by sitting too long in front of the computer with my feet propped on the desk—gave myself a roaring case of sciatica. Just sitting in a desk chair hurts, and I’m so spavined I can barely limp to my favorite venue, the refrigerator.

Welp, I’d bought some nice fabric with which to  make some new drapes for the bedroom, and I figured, what with Charley staying at M’hijito’s house for the nonce, that I could spread the stuff out on the floor, trim it up, and get started on sewing the hems. Having to reach and stretch like that would surely loosen up the kinked muscles and pinched nerve.

That didn’t happen. It was after 5 p.m. before I finished. Then I had to race to wash up and get to class, skipping dinner to get there on time.

Today I have about three hours to do on another two chapters of this author’s work. It will have to be done on the laptop, obviously. While it’s possible that the Japanese characters in the copy are overtaxing Word, I kinda doubt it. I’m pretty sure the desktop’s program has corrupted. Oh well. At least I can sit on the sofa to work. If I can finish by noon, maybe I’ll still get a chance to make curtains.

And so, to work…

Readings

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What I’m reading this morning:

Revanche of A Gai Shan Life received a very creepy series of telephone calls. Fortunately, she’s bright enough to recognize a scam, even when it’s posed as an alarming threat and associated with the name of an outfit  accredited by the Better Business Bureau. The levels to which crooks will go…amazing! It’s important to know about this one, and always to remember never to share any information with anyone who calls on the phone and tries to wheedle or extort it from you.

Rachel Adams over at The New Yorker cranks a ridiculous number of words on a ridiculous topic.  Just to show how WT old Funny really is, at heart…I crave what’s in the picture—for breakfast! Yum!

At The Atlantic‘s website, Derek Thompson and his readers hold forth on the cost of bringing up baby. Thompson publishes a pair of pie charts that compare the cost of parenthood in 1960 with today’s costs. Having been around and fully sentient in 1960, I commented on the article as Melete, my incarnation as proprietor of Adjunctorium:

In 1960 most women stayed home and took care of the kids, and decent public schools were the rule, not the exception. Today women must work to help keep the staggeringly expensive roof over the family’s head, and so the kids are warehoused in day care facilities that may consume half or more of the woman’s salary. Today public schools are institutions of social work, not education, and so people who care about their kids’ learning put them in private or parochial schools — again necessitating that their parents leave them in an expensive shelter while Mom and Dad work 8 to 10 hours a day.

With both parents trudging to the office every day, owning two cars is no longer an option. In 1960, many families had only one car, especially if they lived in regions that had viable public transit.

Housing, cars, gasoline, and healthcare cost much more relative to income than they did in 1960. Clothing manufacture has been offshored, taking away Americans’ jobs but giving us acres and acres of cheap clothing.

The cost of child-rearing is thus interwoven with many of the other costs on the chart: Higher costs of housing and health care (not to mention social pressures) push both parents into the workplace, and this drives up the cost of caring for the kids. Education costs more because without a SAHP in most households, middle- and upper-income families are less engaged with the public schools, the quality of the schools continues to fall, and so those parents shell out to put their kids in private schools.

Not all these factors are necessarily bad — few of us want to return to the good old days when most women couldn’t get a decently paying job because they weren’t welcome in the boys’ club that was the workplace. But…the cost of providing women career opportunities and cutting the chain to the stove obviously is going to be higher child care costs and higher transportation costs.

LOL! Speaking of the cost of education, I was amazed to learn what the school where we sent our son is charging today. If we had to educate a child today, we could not begin to send him there on what my husband earned as a corporate lawyer. We’d both have to be corporate lawyers to put the kid in that school! Instead, we would have had to move to the suburbs (DXH strongly disliked commuting, and so we lived in an upscale central-city enclave) in hopes of finding a halfway decent public school, pushing up the cost of transportation and day care.

 

Live-Blogging from Hell

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Mwa ha ha!  You’ll recall I thought it was a lovely day this morning? Even vacation-like? Well, when you think about it, nano- means very, very, excessively extremely small. That does describe the extent of today’s minivacation.

Before long I get around to loading the sheets in the washer. Check one item off the list.

Next quickie project is to water the potted plants outside, which fortunately are fairly close to the side door to the garage, where the washer & dryer reside. I reach over to turn off the spigot and hear this husky “drip-drip-drip” and by golly it’s coming from inside the garage.

The garage sink, into which the washer drains, is COMPLETELY PLOGGED UP and water is now pouring onto the floor.

Shut off the spin cycle. Get the plunger. Plunge and plunge and plunge and plunge and plunge and plunge to no avail.

Call the plumber. He’ll come over sometime this afternoon.

Try to mop the water up off the floor. Lost cause. Open the garage door, move the car outside, get the wide broom, sweep puddles of water out onto the driveway.

The washer is now full of soapy sheets and white underwear. Pour cold water into the bathtub. Haul out the undies, wring as much soapy water out as my ancient hands will permit. Rinse them out in the tubful of water, wring, hang on plastic hangers to dry. Decide I’d just as soon not leave the sheets sitting the the washer all day. Remember how  my mother and I used to have to rinse all the clothes and linens, including my father’s enormously heavy khakis, in the big utility sink in the service porch, then drag them out to the backyard and hang them up on the clotheslines. If a shamal (a sandstorm) came rolling in from the desert or a rain squall washed ashore from the Persian Gulf, we would have to run to grab the clothes off the line before the flying dirt or water hit.

Those were the good old days. Not.

Funny. The plumbing never seemed to back up in those halcyon times.

Haul the sheets into the bathroom, rinse them in the tub, wring them as best as I can, drop them back in the bucket, haul them to the backyard and hang them on the makeshift clotheslines out there.

Hm. Walking through the kitchen, I notice that the kitchen sink is backed up, too. Call the plumber to report this, so he’ll know what he’s contending with. He says that means the kitchen line we thought we’d unplugged a few days didn’t really get unplugged. He’s armed with all his machinery.

It’ll be a while. The really BIG thing I needed to do today was to file The Copyeditor’s Desk’s annual report with the Corporation Commission. I’m late, and probably accruing late fees as the days pass. But it’s easy: get online, enter the corporation’s registration number, update a form, fork over about a hundred bucks, and click “done.”

Sounds easy, anyway.

But….

I get up to retrieve my wallet, wherein resides the corporate credit card.

It’s not in my purse.

It’s not in my class junk bag.

It’s not in the car.

IT. IS. FUCKIN’. GONE!!!!!!!

I can’t find my wallet anywhere. Nowhere. Anyplace. Noplace!!!!!!!

Maybe I left it at the window & door guy’s shop when I took out a credit card to pay him. Of course, they’re “family oriented” and close over the weekend. No one there.

Okay. So…can I find the credit card number and just enter the damn thing at the Corporation Commission’s site? It means taking a chance that someone is madly charging up truck tires and boom boxes on that card, but hey. All I have to do is say I didn’t realize it was gone when I was submitting forms online.

Well. No. I can’t find the credit card number. My file folder full of statements is over at the accountant’s. Fortunately she lives across the street. She comes over with the statements, and with advice:

CALL. AMERICAN. EXPRESS. NOW. NOT. LATER!

And while you’re at it, call the Mastercard vendor, too. Do not even THINK of waiting until Monday when you can get the window dude on the phone!

Oshitodamnohell…

BUSINESS OWNER: Okay, but how’s about I post the annual report first?

ACCOUNTANT: You could probably get away with that.

Welp, we find the full account number in a piece of correspondence AMEX sent at the time I opened the account (otherwise, they show only the last four digits on their statements).

So I sit down to do the annual report and…that’s when I realize I don’t know when the card expires.

Rifle through all the papers and receipts in the files: no clue.

Damn.

So, get on the phone to AMEX and Mastercard to report missing-or-stolen card. They cancel the accounts and say they will reissue new cards. While chatting with the AMEX CSR, realize that holy god! My flicking Medicare card was in that wallet, and Medicare kindly stamps your goddam SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER on the card and then demands that you carry it everywhere with you! Have a near melt-down on the phone.

Moving on… Transfer the amount of down payment for the windows from savings over to checking and use that to pay the balance on the Mastercard, with which I paid the window guy.

After all these tergiversations, I remember—a day late and a dollar short—that at one point along the line I photocopied the contents of that wallet. Dig this out, and yes, it shows the Medicare card, a Mastercard, two AMEX cards, a driver’s license… Hmmm….Apparently I also had a J.Jill card in there.

Can’t get a human being at J.Jill, only the MOST infuriating robo-answerer in creation. Only option there is to cancel the card altogether. Good. Less opportunity to charge stuff up.

Now I am without a charge card. And I charge everything. I do not carry cash. I buy gas at Costco, and you have to use your AMEX card to buy gas there, unless you go inside and buy a cash card (which I’ll have to do tomorrow, with a check, since I have to drive from proverbial pillar to annoying post next week).

The plumber shows up. “This looks bad,” says he.

He breaks out his rotorooter tool and climbs on the roof. As I write this, it is 109 degrees in the shade of the back porch. You don’t even want to think about what the temperature is like in the full glare of the sun atop a dark roof.

In the presence of another human being, my hysteria abates from its high pitch. A vague memory arises: didn’t I read some PF blogger’s advice somewhere that a person should take her Medicare card out of her wallet and stash it someplace in the house? And didn’t I…did I?…act on that?

Dredge through a file drawer to find the hanging folder for Medicare, and therein find a file labeled À la carte. And hot dang! There’s the damnfool Medicare card!

Somewhere along the line, for one brief shining moment, I experienced a flicker of common sense. A miracle!!!! Whoever has my wallet does not have my Social Security number.

What. a. freaking. nightmare.

…..oh, but it gets better….

[PLUMBER walks into kitchen and runs water in the sink]

HOMEOWNER: Hm. Looks like it’s running.

PLUMBER: Actually not. It’s plugged up solid.

HOMEOWNER: Get the jackhammer.

PLUMBER: That’s what I’m doin’!

I think he’s joking. I hope.

PLUMBER goes back on the roof, having asked me to stand next to the sink and watch what happens. Spends another ten minutes laboring with the drain snake.

He comes down and opines that the drain is now clear.

I remark that I can’t recall blocked pipes when I was a little kid.

“Well, people didn’t rely on the plumbing as much then. We didn’t have dishwashers, and a lot of people didn’t even have washers in their homes.”

Right. And when water came out of a faucet, enough came out to matter…

Moving on, he notices a gallon of vinegar sitting on the garage table—I use it in the dishwasher. He says, “If we could pour a gallon of that down the drain, it would be good.”

I say, “How about ammonia?”

Says he, “That would be even better.”

I haul out a half-gallon bottle of ammonia. “Pour it all down the kitchen sink,” he says. “And use some of it to clean the sink!”

I put on a pair of rubber gloves and proceed as directed. We let the ammonia sit there for ten or twenty minutes. Then fill the sinks—what with the hateful low-flow kitchen faucet, it takes another ten or twenty minutes to fill the kitchen sinks. I ask if it would be possible to get one of those plastic faucets, like the one on the utility sink, that actually works and put it on the kitchen sink. He thinks (erroneously) that I’m kidding.

It’s 3:03 p.m. I have not done the annual report (nor will I, now, until Tuesday or Wednesday), I have not picked up the piles of paper off my desk, I have not read the rest of the client’s MS, I have not read any part of the ARC awaiting attention, I have not printed out the stuff about the windows and filed them, I have not gone to Costco (nor can I, until new credit cards come in), I have not graded student papers, I have not cleaned the floors or dusted, I have not washed the windows. I have not scanned and deposited the most recent check from Google Adsense. My hands are burning from scrubbing sinks and sink grids with Barkeeper’s Friend. It is hotter than Hell in here. I am going to bed, perhaps never to arise.

With any luck.

 

 

Nanovacationing

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Up at 4:00 a.m.; parked in front of the computer by 4:30; worked on a client’s manuscript till 6:00. Wrote a to-do list. Then walked away from the desk and into a lovely little nanovacation.

What a beautiful, beautiful morning! Jumped in the pool and swam around for awhile, all the while tossing the ball that Cassie kept throwing into the drink. Put on some clean clothes, fixed a light breakfast, and came to light in a rocking chair on the deck. Smugly dipped a strawberry into a pile of crunchy sugar while reading about Nanny Bloomberg’s scheme to ban New Yorkers from slurping down a Big Gulp.

Ah! This is the life. Taking an hour or so away from the contract work and the blogging work and the housework and the yardwork is like going on a tiny vacation: a nanovacation. By the time I came to the end of my second cup of coffee, I felt nice and relaxed.

Things are going well just now. A spate of business has been pouring across the minicorporate threshold, and incredibly, when I cite our new hourly rate, people agree to pay it! Crystal, the ad agent extraordinaire, recently came up with another plug of money for FaM, which is always good. If this keeps up, we may very well have enough income from the work we know we can do for both Tina and me to knock off the menial work—waiting tables on her part, teaching freshman comp on mine.

I’ve been invited to join a new networking group, something called WOAMTEC, and the energetic proprietor of K&J Windows and Doors proposes to get me invited as a guest (and maybe as a member) to the chapter of BNI he belongs to. The guy is an effervescent businessman and networker, and when he found out what we do, he expressed interest in possibly hiring us, but more to the point, he started to dispense advice on how to get leads and how to generate business by developing lots and lots of business contacts. He pretty much confirmed what Tina and I had already come to realize: One of us needs to function as the rainmaker and one needs to run the actual work and supervise the subcontractors.

Ultimately I did decide to go with K&J, much as I like the estimable Chip of Freelite. The product he’s selling, Simonton, seems to be very good—in the same quality range as Milgard (in some respects somewhat better)—and the price is a little lower. He ended up underpricing Chip by about $2,000 on the three doors I decided to install. Instead of cheapying down with only two doors, I decided to select the narrow rails instead of the more expensive wide “French” rails and go for all three, rather than end up with two in white vinyl and one in black aluminum.

These doors should be marginally more secure (they’ll still need to be shored up with a stick in the runner) and much more energy efficient. They’re low-E, EnergyStar windows, and they come with tempered glass, which is a little harder to break. Unlike Milgard, Simonton also will provide a supplemental barrel-type lock, which can go into either the floor or the frame above the door—believe I’ll outfit each door with both. The cost of lead abatement magically dropped from the $150/door that I thought was being quoted to only $50 per door. That may have been what his manager was saying in the first place, and I may have misunderstood. Anyway, a total of $150 is a big improvement on what I expected would be a $450 hit. The total cost is a little over $4,000, which is about what I had privately budgeted for the job.

So, I think these will amount to a desirable improvement to the house for (objectively speaking) not all that much money. They’ll not only look a lot better, they’ll be safer and much more energy-efficient.

The pool is so lovely at this time of year, as the weather starts to get warm. Yesterday it was 112, but the water is still cool enough to refresh. Dropping into a clear pond of cool water is a perfect way to start a hot day…and an even more perfect way to end one.

Getting rid of the hated devil-pod tree was the best thing I’ve done, where that pool is concerned. We’ve had a few days that were breezy enough to blow junk into the pool, but I haven’t had to spend an hour at a time shoveling bushels of long, strappy leaves and pots off the bottom and unclogging the cleaning system. It’s now safe to let the system go for several days at a time, without having to hover over it and check several times a day to be sure it’s not choking. That makes pool care really very easy.

Sure is better than having to mow a lawn! 🙂

The arborist was right, though, that the devil-pod tree would try to resuscitate itself by shooting up runners from the roots. The other day I found one sticking up between the flagstones, 35 feet away from the trunk! And several keep struggling back to life on the far side of the east wall. The only thing that will beat these things back is undiluted Roundup concentrate. Yuck!

Updated my Linked-In profile and invited a whole bunch of people to “connect,” many of whom I’d almost forgotten about. Built a contacts list in Google and realized that Google Contacts can be made to work, in a crude way, like a bare-bones database. It will do what I need it to do, anyway, which is sort contacts by category and build mailing lists of clients, to whom I intend, very soon, to start sending a quarterly e-newsletter. Realized I’d forgotten to file this year’s annual report with the Corporation Commission, which turns out to be just as well, because this will provide an opportunity to add Tina as a director, giving us more credibility with our application to the AAAME program.

And so, I think, to brew another pot of coffee and enjoy the last few moments of moderate temperatures this morning, and then to work…

 

Life, Interrupted

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Ever have the feeling that every single time you sit down (or stand up) to do something, you get interrupted about every 30 seconds? It feels like that most of the time around here, which is weird, because there’s no one around to interrupt but a couple of dogs. Yesterday, when I was trying to get out from under the two- or three-day task of rewriting and posting this summer’s English 102 course, the phenomenon seemed to be working in full force.

Woke at four, as usual, which should’ve given me plenty of time to get my act together. Wrote blog posts, started back to work on the course, eventually got around to fixing breakfast. If it’s not dogs barking and mock-fighting, it’s phones ringing, e-mail notifications binging, timers going off, the teapot whistling, people showing up at the door, plants crying out for water as temps hit 100 degrees, the pool pump making a weird noise, pool cleaner stopping dead in the water… Even Gerardo the Lawn Dude Extraordinaire surfaced, bearing a check I’d written a few days before. He’d left it in his pocket when he put his pants through the washer, and the ink washed off. Would I write him another?

Hateful HP scanner software made me rescan a check for deposit four times. It operates so slowly that I’ll get up while it’s dragging its way through a process and go do something else: self-interruption, as it were. Went off to make the bed. Came back, restarted the program. Went off to feed the dog. Came back, restarted. Went off to put a load of laundry in the washer. Came back, restarted. And so on to infinity.

The whole day went that way. Got a lot done, but it was all done in fits and starts. Gestalt is the pattern of my life.

Came down with a sore throat yesterday. Cringe! Surely not a relapse of that hideous disease that made me so sick…and with which La Maya is still sick after six weeks of it???

Had to go to choir, that notwithstanding. Dragged home, dropped a Zyrtec knockoff, hoping the throat was an allergy symptom. Climbed into the sack around 10:30. Fell asleep over detective-novel copy, due back to the publisher on the 23rd.

Awake again at 4 a.m. At that hour, dawn is just barely beginning to break. How does the body know when the sky is only just starting to grey out? Must be magnetic, like a bird’s brain. Oh well. At this time of year, that’s a fact of life: the alarm is set to go off at 4 in the morning.

It’s kind of nice, because it does provide time to approach the day at a leisurely pace.

Throat still hurt. Must not be an allergy: otherwise the Zyrtec would have fixed it overnight.

Out the door at 6:45, off to the weekly business group meeting. So, so, sooo tired I could barely drive. Almost fell asleep at the wheel while stopped at a light. Realized…uh-oh. Shouldn’t have been driving at all.

Still zombified by the time the Scottsdale meeting broke up around 9:30. Had to consciously fight falling asleep as I drove back across the city. WTF?

Got home. Crawled into the sack around 10:15 or 10:30, after a few minutes of doggy exuberance. Charley soon gave up trying to drag Cassie off the bed and settled down on the floor. Slept all the way through until two o’clock in the afternoon! Holy mackerel. I don’t usually sleep in the daytime at all, much less for four hours.

Woke up feeling refreshed, for the first time in weeks. And the sore throat was gone.

Googled Zyrtec. Decided the toxic drowziness was probably a side effect. When they say “24-hour,” they’re not kidding.

Started to write this post. Ignored Charley. He responded by depositing diarrhea all over the family room. Cleaned that up. Remembered the frying plants. Pavement too hot to walk on barefooted; went to get shoes; interrupted by discovery that Charley had already retrieved shoes (he is a retriever, after all) and was eating them. Retrieved shoes from retriever. Watered plants. Back to computer. New e-mail. Decided to check neglected college e-mail system. Important message from departmental secretary, nearly missed. Cope with that, after retrieving another stolen shoe from the retriever. And so on, again, to infinity.

Many, many, many interruptions later, came back to this post, which by then had managed to disappear. Rewrote the first part. M’hijito showed up an hour and a half late. Miserable day for him, no doubt: when he refrains from complaining, that’s when you know he’s beyond his endurance level. Played with dogs. Consumed whiskey. Saw son and dog out the door. Came back to finish this. “This” interrupts plan for dinner, which interrupts need to finish editing the detective novel, which once again will interrupt sleep tonight.

And so, to work….

One Down, a Million More to Go…

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Last night we had the final exam for the real estate course. I felt like I was walking into the Jaws of Doom, so convinced was I that I was gonna bomb the thing. I was totally unprepared, and so exhausted I could hardly walk. The past 5 weeks have devolved into one time-consuming, headache-inducing screw-up, hassle, bugaboo and freaking catastrophe after another, and so I’ve had almost no time to study the content. I figured I was going to fail for sure.

Well.

When our Realtor friend said getting the license was “easy,” he wasn’t kidding. Of the 80 questions, I’d be surprised if I missed 10. Most of them were factoid questions, and of those most were so intuitive you probably could answer a good 80% of them without ever reading the book. There were five or six math questions, which of course I’m incompetent to do. Of those, I know I got three correct; I made a good guess at one, leaving two almost certainly wrong. So: two or three of the math questions wrong. Three or four of the factoid questions concerned material not covered in our textbook (the instructor draws on two texts for his questions)—had to make guesses on those. So I’m estimating I missed about six or seven questions.

To get 75%, you’d have to get twenty questions wrong! And…to get twenty of those see-Dick-run questions wrong, you’d have to be so far out in left field you’d qualify as mentally retarded.

All of which is neither here nor there, because on Tuesday, when he reminded us that because it’s a five-week course the final was scheduled for last night, not next week during the regular final exam period and I realized that on Wednesday I wouldn’t have a chance of finding time to review 14 chapters, I asked him what would happen if I failed this exam after having scored a 96 on the mid-term. And…brace yourself…at that point he said not to worry, everyone in the course would get an A or a B. No one would get less than a B in the course.

Heh.

Anyway. It is ridiculously easy. And it’s pretty interesting. You certainly learn a lot of things that you should have known before ever setting a pen to a purchase contract, a mortgage agreement, or an apartment lease.

Bitch of a week here. I told you we fired the client who converses with the dead, right? That leaves us without work, which has Tina agitated. Two incoming queries appeared today; one looking for someone to edit his thesis, another from some outfit trolling for slave labor. Last week of instruction—finals coming up next week. Students are also agitated, lobbying for hurried return of their gigantic final papers. Much nagging, whining, and nail-biting in those precincts.

This morning I’m going out to Tempe to drop by and sign some paperwork at the new insurance agent’s office. Thence to the credit union branch on the main campus. Then over to the GDU library to scour Literary Market Place for leads to publishing houses Tina and I can hit up for freelance work, and then it’s off to meet Tina for a nice lunch to celebrate the end of the semester and, more to the point, to calculate a strategy to bring in some more (and better) work. Back to the house to write up an exam for my own students and send that off to the copy center. Then have to translate their grades out of my spreadsheet into the hated Blackboard so they can view their final score, a process that takes about eight times as long as it should because it has to be done manually and because BB screws around with you as you enter Each. And. Every. Score.

So that will fill absorb every moment of productive time today, I expect.

Discovered a $1230 discrepancy in my checking account and can NOT find the error(s), so had to make a balance adjustment in that amount. Fortunately it’s in my favor; otherwise I’d have ended this month with about a $300 balance. But it looks like I’ll have to hire the accountant to untangle whatever mess I made there.

Noticed last night that the pool is busted again. Gotta get up from writing this post and go fix that, or else turn off the power and leave the thing to grow algae while I’m racing around the city today.

Had to buy a new toilet, the facility in the middle bathroom having given up the ghost. Actually, neither that one nor the one in the so-called master bathroom had a very strong grip on the ghost when I inherited them from Satan and Proserpine. I like this new one so much, I may have WonderPlumber come back after I recover from the summer’s penury and replace the one in the alleged master bathroom.

Told him about my idea to turn the fourth bedroom (now the unused TV room) into a luxurious spa, complete with vast bathtub and a walk-through into the closet-like master bathroom. He thought it was a great idea. Estimated it would cost around 10 grand.

Well…when I’m a rich old real estate agent, eh?